Un sueño sin noche

A Dream Without Night brings together ceramic pieces by Naomi Gamarra (Geneva, 1999) that are articulated around a speculative archaeology of care, memory, and transmission. Through materials such as hair and lice, the artist constructs a symbolic universe where biographical, historical, and mythological elements are intertwined.

The starting point is the gesture of delousing, understood not only as a hygienic practice but as an act of daily care with a strong emotional and social charge. In various cultures, this intimate gesture generates spaces of closeness, trust, and bodily narrative. In the exhibition, these scenes are revisited to propose a community of “lousy” beings who care for each other, transform, and connect through contact.

The origin of this gesture comes from Gamarra’s personal memory. Recalling her childhood when she shared her room with her mother and her mother’s friends, whom she now calls “comadres,” and when hair care was accompanied by rituals, such as delousing. Between conversations, silences, and braiding, a space of trust and complicity was woven between women. In that small room, full of stories, lice were not just parasites, but witnesses to bonds, conflicts, and care. This intimate experience shaped her desire to think of the body as a collective territory and the act of delousing as a way of creating community through affective and everyday life.

Braided hair, reinterpreted ceramics, and hybrid figures make up a group of works that explore the symbolic dimension of lice, redefining them as an ambiguous figure: a being that migrates, adheres, and transmits. Considering its parasitic nature, Gamarra also understands it as a carrier of information, which has even been discovered to be capable of offering insights into the diet, migration, and life customs of ancient communities through the study of DNA found in mummified lice.

Starting from everyday scenes present in pre-Columbian Moche ceramics (100 AD), such as women and the deity Mollep delousing themselves, the artist proposes a contemporary reinterpretation that does not reproduce these iconographies, but rather speculates on them from an affective perspective. In this intersection between past and present, the domestic and the ritual, new ways of narrating history from the intimate and the corporeal are opened up.

The presence of hair in the works, emerging from the ceramics or arranged as a trace, refers to the persistence of feminine and community ties. Beyond the physical, hair is presented as a trace, memory, and sign of intergenerational cohabitation. The exhibition thus proposes a reading of the body as a living archive, where the biological and the symbolic intertwine.

Through this installation, Gamarra proposes an inversion of hierarchies: the profane acquires ritual status, the marginal becomes hegemonic. A space for reinterpreting identity is created, where the small, the everyday, and the affective allow us to imagine new forms of community, power, and transmission.